


good down to the bones

by FromTheMouthofKings



Category: Leverage
Genre: Character-focused, F/M, Introspection, M/M, Multi, Post-Season/Series 05, Team as Family, they've grown so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21984613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromTheMouthofKings/pseuds/FromTheMouthofKings
Summary: The car saleswoman pats the top of what is soon to be the latest model of Lucille and says, "This van is good down to the bones," and Hardison wants to do the same to Eliot, to Parker. Minus the van part, obviously, but he wants to touch them. To say that phrase. Good down to the bones. The words stick with him as he drives the new van back to the brewpub, and he turns them over and over in his brain as he works on outfitting her. Down to the bones. Good. Good down to the bones.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Nathan Ford, Alec Hardison/Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison/Parker, Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 17
Kudos: 139





	good down to the bones

The car saleswoman pats the top of what is soon to be the latest model of Lucille and says, "This van is good down to the bones," and Hardison wants to do the same to Eliot, to Parker. Minus the van part, obviously, but he wants to touch them. To say that phrase. _Good down to the bones_ . The words stick with him as he drives the new van back to the brewpub, and he turns them over and over in his brain as he works on outfitting her. _Down to the bones. Good. Good down to the bones._

It makes him think of Parker, grinning widely and leaping, gracefully, backwards off of a building, of Eliot grumbling but throwing himself into "fixing" the brewpub menu that Hardison had not-so-subtly created for him to take over. Of Eliot jamming along to Hardison's track-- _two good ol’ boys behind the wheel, taking down bad guys in Lucille_ \--and Parker hanging stolen jewelry on Nate's Christmas tree. Of Eliot, already hurt, launching himself at an armed thug to keep them safe and Parker, that time she broke into a Sterenko to save Archie, standing at the window, moments from escape and saying _No._ Turning back. Wanting to do the right thing, to help. Because that's who she is now, who she's become. That's who they all are, now. 

Nate changed them. Before Leverage, Hardison had been lost, restless, rootless. He hacked whatever he could get into, whatever he thought would make the most trouble or be the most interesting or the most funny. Whatever might make him stand out, whatever would cement his reputation as Alec Hardison, the hacker, the best of the best, the kid who hacked into the Pentagon just because he could. He did not still live in his Nana’s basement, thank you very much, but sometimes he did still feel like the kid who grew up there in the cool, rickety darkness, typing away on his first computer to the sound of his foster siblings’ voices above and the smell of Nana’s cooking wafting down from the kitchen. He was the kid who was dumped into foster care with nothing and made a name for himself with nothing but the cleverness in his brain and the miracles he could make with a keyboard and his own two hands. 

Nate had steadied him, focused him, given him a direction and a chance to use his powers for something useful. Challenged him to make something real of himself, to stop thinking about what he _could_ do and start thinking about what he _should_. Hardison had learned twice as much and stretched himself ten times farther after one year of working with the Leverage crew than he had ever done before, because their clients needed it, and Nate asked for it, and the team was counting on him to get them the information they needed, and new identities, and doors open, alarms off, data stolen, statues crying, and every time the team needed him he found in himself a new miracle. He was scared, and not for the first time in his life--he had already spent many of his twenty-two years hacking into places he shouldn’t be and risking himself to prove he'd done it--but now he had more to risk: his life, the client, the team; people could get hurt, and that gave him motivation, and kind of steadiness that he'd never known he could have, before.

Eliot was steady, too, in a different way--steady like how he systematically knocked out thug after thug to protect the team, like how he took the bullets out of every gun he came across, like how he settled into trusting them despite his grumbling, steady like _I quit this crew when I quit this crew._ Steady like how he could snap any one of them in half but he let Parker poke him and Hardison bicker with him, steady like _Damn it, Hardison, calm down_ , steady like the long, slow choice to throw himself into loving them. Like how he held his mistakes close and his control closer and his determination to do good closest of all, like how Leverage gave him back to himself, gave him a second chance at being--maybe not an honest man, but something close. Steady like how he stood beside Hardison and Parker and said, “‘til my dying day.”

And Parker. Parker had opened up like a flower in the sunshine, growing into herself with the kind of delight that when he first met her, he’d have thought she could only give to jumping off of high places. She’s the kind of person who can do more than just steal things, now--they banded together, at first, because they all needed skills the others had, but as time went on, Sophie had taught Parker to grift and Eliot taught her to hit, Hardison built her robots and new tech and showed her how to break new codes, and Nate picked her out as his new protegee and sat back and watched her learn how to plan for more than just herself. They still work better as a team, but now it’s because they needed each _other_ , not just each other’s skills. They are the kind of people who love each other, now, and Parker loves them maybe the brightest--loves Hardison and Eliot, loves Nate and Sophie and even Archie, too, from afar. She has grown into the kind of person who wants to do the right thing, now, who wants to help people, and at the same time, she’s still the kind of person who wants to jump off buildings for a date. (Eliot loves it. Hardison is...getting used to it, by now. He loves her. He loves both of them. And they love him too, enough to humor him and play his video games, enough to trust his voice in their ears as they break into dangerous places and steal dangerous things, enough to accompany him to his nerd conventions--once, Eliot even dressed up as Worf to Hardison’s Geordi, and Hardison thinks that just might have been the best day of his life.)

Eliot cooks for them, and manages the brewpub that Hardison bought him, and protects them all from anything that might want to hurt them. He hasn’t forgotten his past, and Hardison knows from the shadow that still sometimes lives over him that he’ll probably never quite like the face that he sees in the mirror, probably always be searching for the kid he was before war, before heartache, before he knew how to kill, but he is steadily working every day to make himself into something better.

Parker is still five and a half pounds of crazy, to borrow one of Eliot’s expressions, but she is growing and she is theirs, and so she sits behind the restaurant and draws out plans, jumps off of buildings and crawls through air ducts, and she does it because she loves it, and because she loves helping people and because she loves Eliot and because she loves him.

Parker and Eliot--they both do what they do because they love helping people and they love each other and they love Hardison. And they’re good, they’re so, so good. So Hardison cracks passwords and crawls through news sites looking for clients, and he makes them miracles and he loves them both, he loves them down to his bones.

Those words, _good down to the bone_ , are still playing over in his head when he gets a text from Eliot that says, _You coming in for dinner?_ Hardison finishes up what he’s working on and decides to call it a day. He goes in to their apartment behind the brewpub, behind the Leverage office they've set up there, and Eliot is cooking something on the stove that smells absolutely delicious, a red bandana tied around his head and his knife working steadily on a cutting board. Parker is hanging upside-down from the ceiling with her knees hooked around the rafters, her long, blonde hair falling and rippling like sheets of water. It's difficult to tell, but from the quick flashes of something metal in her hands, he thinks she's taking apart a lock. Or possibly she's taking apart something far more valuable than a lock, you never can tell with that girl. 

Eliot turns when he hears the door close and smiles, and Parker shifts her project to one hand to wave excitedly at Hardison, swaying a little as she does so. "He's making pancakes with chocolate," she says, at the same time Eliot says, "How's the new Lucille?" 

"Pancakes with chocolate sounds delicious, and the new Lucille is looking pretty good, if I may take the liberty of saying so myself," he says. “Not that that means I’ve excused you for getting the last one blown up.”

“Damn it, Hardison, you know that wasn’t my fault. It was the damn squirrel,” Eliot explodes, exactly as Hardison meant him to. 

“Uh huh,” Hardison says in his best Not Convinced voice, trying his best to hide his smile and probably failing horribly. 

Parker flips herself neatly down onto the floor and says, “Chocolate pancakes. Pancakes...with _chocolate_.” She grins up at Hardison with a level of mania that approaches the terrifying. 

“And eggs with vegetables!” shouts Eliot from the kitchen. “I’m gonna keep you two from gettin’ scurvy if it kills me, and it might, if you don’t figure out real soon that orange soda and sugar cereal ain’t a meal.” 

Parker makes a private, scrunchy, disgusted face at Hardison about the vegetables before bounding into the kitchen and hopping up onto the counter, and immediately tries to poke her finger into the pancake batter Eliot is working on. He bats her hand away, and she pouts; he turns his back for a second to tip a pile of vegetables into a sizzling pan on the stove top and she immediately steals a fingerful of batter. 

Hardison follows her slowly into the kitchen and leans against the fridge, watching the two of them. The words are thrumming in his chest, _Good down to the bone_ , and he wants to say it, but instead what he says is, "Man, I love you guys so much. Like, so much. I can't even begin to say how much I love you” and he’s babbling, he babbles, that’s what he does and they both look up at him, a little shocked, because he might be the kind of person to say these things out loud, but they’re not, and mostly he tries to hold back a little, because they might have come a long way from the people they once were, and they might be sleeping together now, as well as working together, and living together, and hopelessly, endlessly in love, but he still worries sometimes about pushing them too far, about spooking them, about failing to be as careful and steady and miraculous as they need him to be, and he’s spiraling now, he does that too, and he just needs to calm down, Hardison, calm down--

"Aww." Parker crinkles her nose at him. "That's sweet. You're sweet." 

Eliot clears his throat and says gruffly, “We love you too. Dork.” He doesn’t seem to remember that he’s still holding a knife pointed at a threatening angle towards Parker, and it says a lot about the way they trust each other that she doesn’t seem to remember it either. 

Hardison pulls his brain back on track. They help him do that. “I mean,” he says, “you guys are good, like. Down to your bones.” 

Eliot turns back to the stove, switching out his knife for a spatula and pushing the vegetables around in the pan. “You hear that on Doctor Whatever?”

“Come on man, it’s called Doctor Who, how many times do I have to tell you that?” Hardison says, fully aware that Eliot is winding him up, but playing along, because really, it is an affront to his nerdy-show-loving heart that Eliot could possibly call a fifty-plus year staple of British television “Doctor Whatever.” He sees a small smirk playing around the corner of Eliot’s mouth and something inside of him relaxes, because it’s okay, they’re still okay, he didn’t scare them off or even spook them or anything. 

Parker slides down off the counter and gets up on her tiptoes to put her arms over his shoulders, and whispers in his ear, “You’re pretty good, too, you know.” 

He puts his hands on her waist, as if to steady her, though really it’s him that needs steadying. “I know it, mama, I know it,” he says, and it’s not a lie, but maybe he needed Eliot and Parker, his hitter and his thief, to make the words really come true.


End file.
